Google Announces Secure Analytics
April 29, 2016
Google has announced that its Google Analytics tool has been made fully secure. For a very long time, Google has said that it will listen to users and their desires to secure traffic for trustworthy sites and not for others.
With privacy and security concerns now beginning to mount ever higher though, the only reasonable choice is to secure all Analytics communications and Google claim that this will help to safeguard users, clients and the internet community as a whole.
Undoubted Focus on Traffic Security
Of course, Google values security very highly in respect to all aspects of Analytics and Google tools, users and end users and its JavaScript and analytics is a big part of this. HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is used with Analytics, ensuring that HTTPS accommodating web browsers encrypt all communications, be it with websites, end users or servers.
This has a direct impact on all traffic passing through the browser and there is no way that unsecured traffic can creep through. There is no choice in the matter as there is no option or way to get around HTTPS encryption of traffic.
You needn’t do a thing for this change to take effect as Google Analytics will automatically take the necessary steps to encrypt your site’s traffic.
How Will This Impact You?
HTTPS encrypted traffic may be slower than similar unencrypted visits and result in lost hits as visitors may navigate away from your page before Analytics has the chance to log the visit, the most obvious example being leaving within second of opening a web page. Of course, this is isn’t constrained to encrypted traffic and can also occur when it is unencrypted but a slower response can see early leave rates higher with secured browsing. With this being said, its doubtful that the minor impact this update to Google Analytics data transfer will have on end users and reporting, if it does it may identify deeper routing issues with your sites page load times and their file size or weight.
Firewalls can sometimes be a bit temperamental with encrypted visits as they aim to shut out unknown and potentially harmful traffic and some block all HTTPS visits. In such a case, data cannot be collected and Analytics may not have the most accurate of statistics concerning your site.
Safe and Secure Communications
It’s not all doom and gloom though, and many people will argue that the pros most certainly outweigh the cons. Perhaps it may be true that data can potentially be skewed a little but in the grand scheme of things, security, privacy and accountability are receiving huge boosts as a part of the latest measures to ensure that traffic and data is as safe as possible.
With all traffic HTTPS encrypted, you can be safe in the knowledge that your clients’ and customers’ information stays in the right hands and you are still able to use to your advantage as you always have been.
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